This invention relates in general to bearings and more particularly to a bearing assembly for a shaft in a housing.
The typical tapered roller bearing arrangement used between a shaft and a surrounding housing includes two bearings, each with a cup or outer race, a cone or inner race, and tapered rollers between the cup and cone. The bearings are positioned such that the tapers of their raceways and rollers project in opposite directions so that one bearing can be adjusted against the other by moving either the cup or cone of the one bearing in the axial direction. The adjustment is usually effected by turning an adjusting nut against the back face of one of the cones.
Bearing arrangements of the foregoing nature require many machining operations on the shaft as well as on the cone and consequently are expensive. Moreover, adjustment is a relatively time consuming procedure.